An anonymous coward writes "Former cypherpunk shares his conspiratorial view on Linux security:
Since then, more has happened to reveal the true story here, the depth of which surprised even me. The GTK development story and the systemd debate on Debian revealed much corporate pressure being brought to bear in Linux. [...] Some really startling facts about Red Hat came to light. For me the biggest was the fact that the US military is Red Hat's largest customer:
"When we rolled into Baghdad, we did it using open source," General Justice continued. "It may come as a surprise to many of you, but the U.S. Army is 'the' single largest install base for Red Hat Linux. I'm their largest customer." (2008)
This is pretty much what I had figured. I'm not exactly new to this, and I figured that in some way the military-industrial/corporate/intelligence complex was in control of Red Hat and Linux. [...] But I didn't expect it to be stated so plainly. Any fool should realize that "biggest customer" doesn't mean tallest or widest, it means the most money. In other words, most of Red Hat's money comes from the military and, as a result, they have significant pull in its development. In that respect, the connection between the military and spying agencies, etc. should be obvious.
Next, the FOSDEM: NSA Operation ORCHESTRA Annual Status Report is well worth watching in its entirety (including the Q&A at the end). To me, this turned out to be a road-map detailing how Red Hat is operating on Linux!"
(Score: 2, Insightful) by knorthern knight on Thursday February 20 2014, @08:58PM
So systemd boots up 2 seconds faster... whoop dee do. Linux is not Windows 95, so the average user is not rebooting a dozen times a day. But Redhat doesn't give a flying f*** about the average user. They only care about themselves. Redhat does cloud computing http://www.redhat.com/solutions/open-hybrid-cloud/ [redhat.com] How do they handle spikes in demand? There are 2 options...
1) Run extra VMs idling 24x7, just in case, which uses up electricity, and increases their power bill at the data centre
2) Run with fewer extra VMs, but rewrite the init system entirely to shave a couple of seconds off the boot time
They go with option 2. It may not sound like much, but when you're handling that many VMs at the data centre, it does make a difference. Rather than running idle VMs, they get by with fewer VMs and use systemd to allow new VMs to spin up a couple of seconds faster. And if it imposes difficulties on average home users, too effing bad.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Thursday February 20 2014, @11:32PM
and this is my fairly unoptimized setup, a friend of mine is reporting 7 seconds because he bypassed netctl. You must live in a universe where seconds are longer, because here in Earth A we don't exactly call a 75% improvement woopty-do material. Can we stop with the "It's all Red Hat's fault." stuff? Next you'll be telling me Red Hat is just pulling strings in Arch. Oh wait... That's what you and the AC already did implicitly! Nevermind.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me]
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